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How Individualism Changed the Economy
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- Опубликовано: 12 авг 2024
- "A society in which the needs and desires of individuals were read and fulfilled by business in the free market."
Notes: kylascan.notion.site/The-Cent...
Toby Shorin: subpixel.space/entries/life-a...
Full documentary: • The Century of the Sel...
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thanks for watching everyone! show links are in description box
Always a good day when Kyla uploads a new video.
As an irrational consumer filled with desire, I love consuming Kyla’s videos.
Kayla, I'm 60 and still working because this economy literally forces us to never retire by it's structure and imposed costs.
Thank you so much for your analysis here. It's spot on with what I lived and watched being done throughout the 1970s - 2000s to today. Just knowing there's another out there who sees the manufacturing of this dumpster fire society and articulates it is incredibly helpful.
Thanks for your insights, fact based identification of issues, and your clarity of expression!!
Quick side-note, related to the U.S. population being demoted from citizens to instead mere consumers: have you noticed that politicians now seldom talk about citizens, having been coached by the Heritage and the CoC and the Federalist goons into instead talking about “taxpayers?” That’s not a coincidence.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how creativity/art has been decimated by this consumer system. This was super insightful, fantastic as always Kyla!
i was just having a convo with someone about that :(
@@KylaScanlon people respond more to what speaks to them than what’s different. That’s why Taylor swift is so popular. There is a market for fringe art and but do most people actually want it? Hypothetically, It may be undemocratic to encourage creativity at times than to allow the system to determine what it wants.
Does the system hinder creativity? Selling things is an optimization process, and new versions of things, while interesting, are unoptimized. People need to know what they're getting. How common are creative people in general? Like, how many people truly have the desire & ability to go beyond the rules and do new stuff? Not many, in my experience, and to my understanding. It's like asking how many people have an IQ of 145+? Not many.
@@genericusername8337 if you ask me. Creativity is valued less than other productivie qualities in society because creativity is inherently inferior to other processes of creating value. And I consider myself a creative person have you. Creativity is awesome 5% of the time but 95% of the time it is useless. People who have the gift of developing creating ideas that are useful greater than 5% of the time are very few and creativity will and should be surpressed in those who can’t effectively use a creative thought. What’s more valuable, The person who creates the art, or the person who reproduces and distributes the product across millions of people?
@@kevinbenitez42 - Why are you setting up a false dilemma between “what speaks [to people]” and “what’s different?” Even just as empty rhetoric that’s pretty lame. It doesn’t even apply to your example, Taylor Swift, who in fact at her breakout stood apart from the crowd aesthetically, just managing to sneak through a crack in the music industry’s wall at a time when they were still reeling from iTunes’ success, back when RUclips was still a chaotic new phenomenon and not yet a coherent part of Google’s walled garden strategy. With shocking frequency “what’s different” speaks to people loudly, but the problem for the new media mega-corporations - bloated, teetering, and under Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard pressure, thus requiring secure returns - is that creativity is not rigidly predictable. What’s creative and different IS wildly appealing, but “monetizing” it is like panning for gold when what Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard demand are a shovel salesforce. So controlling all outlets and delivering copy-paste mediocrity through them instead IS predictable - and was so even pre-Internet - so for every Nirvana who accidentally break through, the industry serves you 1,000 iterations of Bush, Live, Candlebox, and Stone Temple Pilots, cooked in a lab as pink slurry, formed into patties, and served from under a heat lamp lukewarm. You’ll get loads of love as a weirdo, just not a contract and access to the mega-media channels and subsequent global exposure … unless it’s by accident, at which point National Amusements, Advance Publications, Comcast Corp., Sony Corporation, and Fox Corporation will all dutifully trot out your hastily-assembled clones through all subsidiaries across all print, broadcast, and digital platforms.
I have no idea how you do it.... but you literally look into my brain and put into words the thoughts that plague my head.
Thank you, Kyla, for your insight on economic behavior and the economic shenanigans we live on ❤ 😂
I love that documentary and I'm glad to hear you talking about it
thanks for highlighting this Kyla
You're so on point. Great to hear your perspectives
The history of it all really helps put our current state into perspective. Love the way you put it across. I’m quite excited for your book, be sure to let us know when it launches!
It's terrifying when the prospect of purchasing an item has the potential to create more stimulation than actually owning the item... and yet that itself becomes one of its major selling points.
the act of buying is a dopamine hit!
@henry4476 - That was the dark genius of Nike’s obnoxious, and now-ubiquitous, 1980s “Just do it!” campaign: nominally it’s about sports achievement, about some kind of “go after your dreams” mentality, but literally (and not subconsciously, because let’s admit it, its genius is in its crassness … boldly announcing there’s no reason to hide its own odiousness, that the balance between the U.S.A.’s id, superego, and subconscious have all been collapsed into pure braying id - and in your diminished state, you’re meant to perceive this as a good thing!) what it’s demanding of the viewer is “Just buy it, just do it, just feed that bottomless appetitive craving … worrying about sweatshops is for sissies and think-y fxxxxxs, so discard all prudence and second thoughts and buy it buy it buy it NOW, and never feel bad about it … and if your craving ISN’T sated” (and how could it be, when you’ve reached over the gold to grab the dross?) “then don’t think about THAT, just buy it buy it buy it AGAIN! and again and again and again!” Most obnoxiously, early ads were set to the Beatle’s “Revolution,” as if people utterly succumbing to a world of thoughtless appetite, becoming big brainless gaping maws, was indeed the revolution past decades had striven for… And many people hated it, there was ample loud commentary against the campaign - but it won, today it’s everywhere, and no one says a peep. “Just do it!” indeed. Just keep pushing the “one-click purchase” button, no matter what the item, and surely one day you’ll become that self-actualized self you keep dreaming of.
phew, I used to LOVE dopamine@@KylaScanlon
@@KylaScanlonMaybe because historically conducting a successful trade was such a big positive sum game that evolution trained us to trade as much as possible 🤔
This is the most compact, digestible presentation of this subject I have seen. The psychoanalytic basis of individualism is usually overlooked, kudos!
Kyla! So good to see you on my RUclips feed again.
I'd like to point out an example that our society took for granted which is Washers and Dryers.
I used to repair washers and dryers growing up as a kid with my dad. At the time, there was only like 3 major conpeting brands: Whirlpool, GE and Maytag.
The cost of repairing a Washer or Dryer at that time was between $10 to $50. Those parts were necessary for the machine to function but those parts were cheap to buy as well and the consumer did not need to replace the whole machine if those parts failed. However, there were one or two parts in a Washer or Dryer that, if broken, would require the consumer to replace the entire machine. The only drawback to the consumer using those washers and dryers was that they only used knobs.
Ever since the integration of circuit boards, which allowed the user to pick a variety of options, as opposed to just turning knobs, was that if that circuit board broke at all, the entire cost of repairing that machine would be about $200 - $300, which would just be the cost of the entire machine anyway and which just seems silly to me and my dad. But, the average consumer never knew this, they were just sold some unnecessary fancy equipment with fancy lights. This, and the technicians that worked for the machine brands would charge the consumer a lot of money, $300, just to look at the machine and tell you to buy a new one anyway.
Me and my dad believed that people, if given simple parts to work with, can and should fix their own stuff. Unfortunately, the more time passes, the more people are enticed to buy fancy looking lights instead of equipment that is easy to fix on ones own.
one of your best vids yet keep up the good work and thanks for not holding that lil mic no more👏🏽
This dialogue needs to happen more often… glad you’ve made a video about it!
The moment I heard someone besides myself use the term planned obsolescence, I instantly hit that subscribe button! Keep up the excellent work! These are subjects I would like to touch upon in my writing. I appreciate your insight and research.
Thank you for this explanation. It does explain alot of what is going on in the world. Also the sleeping cow at the beginning was awesome
Thank you for sharing. I've consumed a lot of your content over the past several months and like this longer "video newsletter" content. Culture, sub-culture and counter culture are fascinating and I agree humans gravitate to this as we all have gaps in our self-identity. Understanding constructs is fascinating to me and someone who has been in marketing for the past several decades. Understanding needs / wants and selling an "aspiration" is what I do all day and every day. Selling the leather or length of strap of a purse is boring. But selling a sub-culture or counter-culture is exciting. Everyone wants to be seen and to be heard, and EVERYTHING is a life style brand. Whether we want to admit it or not. Peace.
Love it and everything you do ❤
Thank you for this. I also think it ties to personal brands too.
Another documentary adjacent to this is "the men who made us spend"
oh my God things that I’ve (read!) Over the years you put them all together. Thank you so much for your contact.
Content 😂
It's great to hear other people talk about this important documentary
Great video, rare to see a women speaking about these topics, your extremely intuitive and intelligent. Looking forward for more videos!
I happened to come across this documentary on RUclips years ago and was FlOORED! I'm pretty sure it was like the first step in my radicalization lol.
It's incredible. I listen to a lot of financial news/commentary, and you're only the 3rd person I've heard mention that fiscal policy averted a recession in 2022/23.
Thank you Kyla for summarising and contextualising Curtis' important documentary. For folks outside of UK, we need to be lucky and find Adam's documentaries online somewhere (before they get removed - the cycle continues)
I would plug this documentary with my younger humans, but I think it's likely they'll be way more receptive to your take.
To me, there is a sense of a tipping point in this century of self that seemed to occur around Oliver Stone's words spoken by Gordon Gecko - the Greed is Good thing. On an older DVD, there's a directors commentary where Stone speaks to this specifically. The film is set in '87, just before the Black Monday that I remember well. We offshored and globalised and doubled down on psychology as a marketing 'weapon'
There was nothing good about this 'plan' other than we get to see that it is NOT an option to pick Self over All of Us.
Amazing 😊
Wonderful presentation as usual. I'm always recommending The Century of the Self to people and it was a really big influence on me early on. If you want to dig deeper, then maybe Ployani's "the Great Transformation" is worth a read too. Adam Curtis only discusses the last 100 years, but the West became individualistic much earlier than that leading to things like capitalism and the closinng of the commons.
Can't be as spendy folks.
Rein it in. 😅 Hi Kyla, Have an excellent rest of your week & ty for the upload. 👋🏼😊
Great summary of the film.
The question I always wondered: if people can be so easily manipulated, why is democracy the best system we have?
My personal conflicting thought is that perhaps consumerism is not all bad since it could’ve been much worse.
thanks for telling the straight fax. I'm amazed you (we) can still talk truth to power (God bless America.)
❤ nice piece of work
Great video
Learned a lot from this video actually.
Cheers Kyla,
wonderful mind map, of the inter-connectedness of all these concepts and notions interplayed; I find it fascinating the extent to how much consumerism, society and culture has multi-generational framework behind it...
Love the Arthur miller quote, that you included, screenshot-ed that!
Parenthetical mention, are you familiar with the work of cognitive scientist Joscha Bach?
Well put! Good video and I feel like the white board is a game changer 😅. I got lost at a moment or two but then was like oh dope white board.
This is so dope
awesome video
A+ thanks
It would be interesting to connect this to consumer habits at Walmart/Costco type businesses. Disney might have beaten us already with WALL-E
Go Kyla!
The consumer economy can only be sustained through the availability of cheap credit and exploited labor, both of those regimes are breaking down which is why we see the emergence of so many political crises.
For reference Guy Debord and Baudrillard were talking about this stuff 50 years ago. See Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.
I would read a book about this!
YES! LOVE me some Adam Curtis !
The Herbert Hoover impression!
We have come to accept the exploitation of our human nature for profit as normal. It’s an interesting world we live in where our innate human needs are being redirected into consumable products. The products cannot satisfy our needs but can temporarily serve as an escape from them. We become reliant on this escapism because of how chronically unmet our needs have been by society. It’s a viscous cycle.
Your the only person who can make economics sound cool 😎. And I don’t care about this stuff… And I still watch your stuff
A great poetic read (if you like aphorisms) is Guy Debord's Society of the Specatcle which heavily influenced a lot of French Postmodern philosophy. Specifically Baudrillard and Deleuze who wrote heavily on the topics of consumption through sociological and psychoanalytic lenses, although in pretty hallucinogenic prose
oh man im a society of the spectacle hardcore fan hah
@@KylaScanlon **the spectacle intensifies**
@@KylaScanlon If you have the time I definitely recommend *The Consumer Society* by Baudrillard. While a bit more structured than his more famous works it provides a lot of commentary on exactly what you're discussing in this video
Great to see Adams work getting attention, all of his documentaries are excellent. Butt he century of the self is almost necessary viewing to understand the system you live in.
Hypernormalization perfectly explains the craziness going on in North America too
learning about Bernays all those years ago from that documentary was like seeing the matrix code in every marketing gimmick.
it completely changes how you see the consumerist world.
the little word games in advertising, the tricks of salespeople, the absurdist sale signs that don't even try.
in a weird way, there's a little contempt which bubbles up because of how easy it is for us to be fooled. and how people don't seem to care when you point these things out.
I really don't know what to do with all of this "awareness".
but it's much better being conscious than a zombie.
Wait, wait… whatchu got against mechanical keyboards? 15:12
lol - my clackity keyboard is objectively superior to all others and helps me turn thoughts into words!
Great piece, as always. Thank you for sharing!
Wow. This totally made me more aware of how much of a dopamine addiction buying stuff is. Totally agreed. Do we really need an iPhone 15.
it's interesting how the development of the "consumer" is the demise of the human being. This documentary reminds ome of adorno and the culture industry
oh the irony of a Capital One ad (around 14:00) about business credit with no limit... to get all the things you need and want with no concern about spending limits.
also, i wouldn't say that preserving (or maybe rescuing) our humanity is not "woo woo"... but necessary.
I wonder how can we cowboy lasso this system into filling the community and human gap without destroying the opportunities that this provides?
“Yeah man this frickin rokkks” 😂😭
This topic could be a book in itself
16:40 When "community" and "love" are considered woowoo or even woowoo-adjacent, society has a really big problem
Great video. Even more impressed by the pooch in the background that didn’t move a muscle in 20 mins.
Good stuff.. I'm curious if there's a connection with marketing and Carl Jungs theory of the collective unconscious
There’s this image in my mind where the pursuit of the perfect shoe eventually yields the perfect shoe. Ones ignorance to the shoe’s creator, and, the shoe’s existence prior to the individual’s awareness of is irrelevant.
Once found, the shoe not only becomes integrated into the ever shifting body of products comprising the individual. It’s revelation presents a sense holiness. As if the combination of trends and personal tastes coalesced in the form of a shoe, evidences the individuals close proximity to godliness.
Edit: I just ordered cute shoes.
❤❤❤
I don't know who she is but her eyes are so, hypnotically, beautiful.
yes, ''we know when we are being marketed to'' Levis Racing.....
Do you have more thoughts on life after lifestyle ?
Really crazy that all of this started after WWII. It was basically just the question of how can we produce growth after basic needs are already fulfilled. A society driven to fulfill needs they actually don't have is pretty insane in itself and it is Kind of crazy how this has evolved so quickly. How hard will it be to convince people to see that a bigger house or a boat will never bring the fulfullment they seek?
I've seen the issues described here for a long time myself, but I was never able to put them in words as clearly as in this video. How could a society as a whole ever understand that most of their desires are just manufactured by the ads they consume all day long? It makes me feel even more like that the paradigm of indefinite growth is flawed, but I still don't have any better system to propose than the system we are using at the moment either. So what should we do?
it happens to coincide with WW2, but the catalyst probably is mass industry and manufacturing for these products being much cheaper and easy to achieve.
notice that until chinese manufacturing arrived on the scene in the late 90s early 2000s, things were still repaired for example, TVs, laptops, computers. Repairing them was serious work that had utility. after the rise of china the manufacturing of alot of low level technology became so much cheaper that it doesn't really make sense to pay an american min wage by the hour to repair your PC speakers... the new ones cost like $20.
all of this is to say technology drives economic growth, which drives societal and cultural changes , and so on.
If consumer behavior is what drives culture in the macro economy, then institutionalized education and corporations focused on manufacturing would prove futile other than each individual becoming both a shallow producer & consumer in some way shape or form losing the element of creativity.
Work spaces with learning & tutoring simultaneously geared towards innovation while retaining economic trade within allied nations as means for capital goods & services would more likely prove to be effective.
Great video on consumerism. Now the real question is even after making this video do you still desire that bike to have S-Works on it?
lmao one of my buddies said the exact same thing
Our society (capitalism ) depends upon people identifying themselves through what they buy.
You mention climate change - the capitalists (and leaders in both political parties) will literally only spotlight solutions to climate change that involve buying more junk - when the obvious answer would be to reduce consumption.
The biggest act of rebellion in our society is to be a happy with what you have.
Regarding the economy, I find it useful to think of currency as “production-directing tokens” … and also to at least privately mentally acknowledge that in the U.S.A. today only a relatively minimal number of those tokens circulate among the laboring classes, i.e. among all strata of the middle class and the poor. The vast majority of those tokens are instead tied up in b2b transactions, hedge fund speculation, the illiquid investments of the super-duper rich (all those uninhabited skyscrapers in Canary Wharf owned by oil billionaires), and in utter nonsense - held hostage, basically, while we in the wealthy world circulate the remaining 8% of tokens by swapping trinkets rather than by producing anything socially necessary … and for the rest of the world, the hoarding of those tokens by a handful of U.S. cartels makes it “cheaper” for a developing nation’s government to watch people languish unemployed and starving than to employ them in building infrastructure, because wealthy nations (and their expensive high-tech armies) hold a cudgel of debt over developing nations on which the interest payments alone are crippling, So indeed, while buying a trinket (or “fueling the economy,” if you will), it’s hard not to ask myself “Is this really the best way to direct production? Through tokens which so warp the value of things that millions starve within sight of arable land, millions more sit idle while factories go unoccupied, and most needs globally are not met even as literal aristocrats create concrete-and-steel investment accounts by buying rows of luxury skyscrapers no one will ever live in?” Obviously a sensible U.S. tax policy would counter most of that token-hoarding, and a global debt jubilee would usher in an era of productivity unprecedented in history and lifting up billions from actual poverty … but what’s going to make that happen? Not buying more trinkets, I don’t think. Unless we want it all to end in violence, part of the solution will have to come from within the seat of empire itself, from the citizens of wealthy nations. Maybe it begins by more people looking around at the growing conflagration we’re fueling and asking ourselves “Is this REALLY the best way to direct production? With Charles Koch indirectly buying the U.S. Armed Forces, hedge funds in the U.S. outright buying newspapers to strip them for parts and shutter them, while you and I swap pricey trinkets and the rest of the world struggles under insuperable artificial debt?” I’m not one of the doomsayers, I do think there’s a way out … I’m just startled by how long it’s taking for likeminded people to get it together and kick the praxis into high gear.
Sorry, the whole “consumer spending economy” thing, real though it may be, always pushes me over the edge … and I suppose, by some measures, reacting with an uninterrupted breathless mega-paragraph could be seen as a very “me-centric” reaction. 🤷♂️ But how else can humanity communicate?
One day I will be this smart.
Not today. Not even one day soon. But someday.
i didn't know there were that many diff types of spoons lmao i cant name anything but big spoon or small spoon maybe mediumm
I had a feeling you were an Adam Curtis fan. 😂
did u ever get into the jung dullas Brothers connection?
Manifold bet Kyla reads Anti-Oedipus this year
Is it weird to say I love your shirt or does that go against the whole thesis of the vid
This was the real redpill that others try to pretend they have to offer. Thanks for the information.
Is your audio sped up? 😔
The entire world and the owners of capital have gotten rich off of us, while we are going further and further into poverty.
Nice video, you made some good points, but the cake story isn't true.
While food companies were developing cake mixes they had continual debate over whether fresh eggs should be used, it didn't happen after. And the debate was over the quality of the baked cake, not how easy it was.
Cake mixes were also initially successful, they weren't a failure on launch.
There is some truth to the story about the focus groups, but that happened later when sales stopped growing, and resulted in companies promoting the idea that, yes, baking the cake was easy, but it was only step 1. You then had to frost and decorate it, and that was where your skill and talent came in.
For a source, Snopes isn't always a reliable website, but their article on this is pretty good.
this was sick
first
woo!
The Facebook pixel for targeted advertising is the evolution of "manufactured consent". Indeed RUclips and twitter help to reinforce self identity with echo chambers.
I agree with you about consumption, however it is demand and consumption that gets us new medications, new technology for surgeries, dentistry, x ray scanning so precise we don’t have to open people up to see what needs to be done. Personal computers, electric cars, etc.! The U.S. is the leader in producing products that people want. And because we have consumers who purchase these products it leads to more innovation. The rest of the world, just has to pick up the phone and order it. They have no investment up front… that saves billions of dollars other countries don’t have. The U.S. is 350M out of 8B. A tiny percentage develops everything for the rest of the non producing world. Shut down the U.S. economy… the world literally stops producing new innovations. That’s what the UN wants to do.. shut down the U.S. economy.They are very disingenuous….because it’s the U.S. that leads the way on products, innovation and aid and loans to other countries. Be careful what you wish for, in your air conditioned room. The US is a cash cow for the rest of the world.
You don't need to *believe* in Capitalism for Capitalism to persist.
You just need to practice it...
hey Kyla, my name is everybody
*GDP is Grossly Distorted Propaganda*
Where is the data on the annual depreciation of automobiles and other durable consumer goods?
What is Net Domestic Product?
outside z cave..u r in another cave...and so on 🤓
Wrong
You are becoming less of a little capitalist.
What a great RUclipsr!! She proves that beautiful women can and do create intelligent content without showing ass or stupid content
The century of the ego. The failure of self.
It's called fashion VICTIM for a reason. lol
If you really want to blow your mind, extend this reasoning to trans ideology.
I don’t care about other people.